[ICOM] When cold in Europe, go through conference programme

It's freezing, and it's early. I stepped off the plane into transit in Zurich, and am certain I saw snow on the ground around the tarmac. The trick is to get warm liquid into you quickly, and a seat that is more of a couch. Perfect for warming up and booting up to pound out some mail and the odd blog post before my flight to Lisbon.

Admittedly, I'd glanced at the agenda for the conference a few weeks ago, but had yet to really analyse it. My initial reaction then was that there are some pretty good speakers, from some great companies, from all over the world.

Unpacking it now, it's intense! I think it'ss going to be a few days of complete brain-fry, to be honest.

I'm particularly looking forward to "Measuring Online & Mobile Content in the Emerging Markets" later on today from Scott Julian - CEO of Effective Measure. They're from Australia - and while technically I suppose they're an emerging market - I'm curious as to what they understand the challenges of an emerging market are, if they correlate with my thoughts on our context in SA as an emerging market.

At one level, the only known in my book is that all emerging markets are pretty unique, and painting with the same brush won't work.

The Asian tigers have awesome broadband capacity, and we have unreal mobile phone penetration yet low WAP use. How on earth do you lump those two together if you're looking at Internet audience measurement best practice!? Hopefully Mr Julian has some answers! (no pressure, Scott!)

Equally looking forward to a quick presentation from some of Google's product managers. Not for the topic necessarily, but am hopeful they'll be the other guys at the conference in a t-shirt. Seriously, I just want to see a Google guy in action at a conference. I believe they're really strong at this stuff.

The keynotes will be interesting. The CEOs of the major forces in this game are taking the stage (eMarketer and ComScore). The panel debate of most interest to me for the OPA is a vendor shootout, with Nielsen (whom we use currently), Comscore and Visible Measures talking shop.

Check out the programme for yourself at http://i-com.org/global-summit-2010-programme//

If you have questions to pose to a particular speaker/session from a SA perspective, please tweet me on @joshprefix and use #ICOM. Follow the event on Twitter at #ICOM: Twitter Search results and Bing Twitter search results. As mentioned, you'll find my tweets at @joshprefix.

If there are speakers on the programme that you feel I must meet, equally, please drop me a line and I'll corner them for a chat!

Josh